Conventionally, a navigation system is used to display icons of roadside facilities such as a drug store, a gas station, a restaurant or the like on a road map. Display of the icons of the road-side facilities is configurable based on user input from a display configuration menu. Upon receiving the user input for turning on, for example, the icons of the drug store, the navigation system displays drug store icons around a current position of a subject vehicle on the map. In this manner, a user of the navigation system can locate the drug stores around the current position of the subject vehicle on the road map. However, the user has to display the display configuration menu again to turn off the drug store icons on the road map.
The conventional navigation system displays, for example, the drug store icons on the road map as shown in FIG. 6 when the user specifies the drug store for display in order to locate a nearest one as a destination of a travel or the like. In this case, a drug store B is more accessible than a drug store A because the store B faces a lane where the subject vehicle is traveling. In other words, the subject vehicle has to cross traffic in an opposite lane before entering into the store A. However, the user may choose to enter into the store A only because the store A is closer to the current position of the subject vehicle than the store B.
Furthermore, the conventional navigation system maintains display of, for example, bookstore icons even after the user of the navigation system successfully achieved his/her purpose for dropping in at a bookstore. However, the user has to open the display configuration menu for turning off the bookstore icons on the road map. The bookstore icons kept on the road map may obstacle other icons when the user avoids cumbersome procedure of turning off the bookstore icons in the display configuration menu.
Furthermore, the conventional navigation system may assign, for example, both full-serve restaurant icons and fast-food restaurant icons to one restaurant as representation on the road map when the restaurant has attributes that can be categorized as both of the full-serve restaurant and the fast-food restaurant. In this case, a restaurant D categorized as both of the full-serve/fast-food restaurant may be mistakenly recognized as the fast-food restaurant on the road map when the fast-food restaurant icon for the restaurant D is displayed on top of the full-serve restaurant icon for the same facility.
The problems described above may be caused by displaying all the icons of the specified facility type(s) on the road map, and those icons may merely obstruct other facility icons, location names or the like on the road map.